Mind vs Brain: What’s the Difference? // Ep. 50

In This Episode

• End of Days – Sylvia Brown
• The Secret Life of Plants – Peter Tompkins, Christopher Bird, et al.
• A New Science of Life – Rupert Sheldrake
• The Utah monolith mystery

Is There a Difference Between the Mind and the Brain?

Some people think that the mind and the brain are the same thing.

We disagree. 

Find out the difference between the brain and the mind and why we think there is information that we can tap into that resides outside of our body.

This idea may seem weird to some people, but you might be surprised once you start digging into the studies.

Read the Transcript:

Hugh:    Hi, Walter. This might be a little bit out there for a topic but I'd be interested to hear what you think about the mind versus the brain. So is there like a physical, is everything coming from the physical brain? Or, do you think that there's some other knowledge out there that maybe we receive through the brain to make our decisions?

Walter:    This is really good, thanks. I'm sure you have some interesting thoughts on this too. I'm sure of it.

Hugh:    Hey there! I hope you find this episode useful. I just want to let you know that Walter and I give away something valuable every month that helps traders improve their skills. You can enter to win by simply leaving an iTunes review and leaving a comment on our YouTube videos.

At the end of each month, we'll look at the comments and reviews from the month and we'll pick a winner at random. Each comment and each review counts for one entry during the month that it's pitted.

So, if you're interested in that, be sure to enter after this podcast is over. Alright, back to the episode.

Walter:    The way I look at Science is, it's really materialism. So if you talk to Scientists in essence, most Scientists, not all but most Scientists in a professional sense, they are in the field of materialism. And that's kind of the way that our science has gone down this path of if you can touch it, if you can see it, if you can hold it, if you can measure it then it's real. Everything else is not.

Now that hasn't always been the case but it certainly has been the case the last you know hundred and fifty years or so in our scientific fields. So if you talk to a lot of neuroscientists, many of them, not all of them but many of them will tell you just like you know how we map the gene.

The genome, the human DNA, when we map that out, they thought we're going to figure out all disease because of course all disease is due to our genes. Which we found out it's not quite the case. It certainly isn't you know, there's epigenetics; the interaction between your genes and environment.

A lot of hardcore neuroscientists will tell you that if they map out the brain completely — and they're not there yet. They don't know exactly what every little nook and cranny of the brain does. They have a general idea of Broca's area and you know this is where your emotions are and this is where your frontal lobes are. Where you do your planning and speech and listening and they have that.

That's all but they don't know exactly down to the neuron sort of where things are like they do with DNA. So some of them will tell you that as soon as we get to that point, where we map up the entire brain, — then we will know everything there is that you need to know about the brain and you will know the mind.

However, there are a lot of other scientists that believe that the mind is separate from the brain. I had whole classes in this in graduate school because I actually had some pretty cool professors who were kind of deep into this philosophical aspect of brain science. So it's really kind of cool.

My belief is that the brain is like an antenna and so your mind is beyond the physical kind of like a sailboat. So if you're on a sailboat in fact, you might — it's not a very good day today but you might — see some sailboats behind me. I'm not sure if you can. There's one. I don't know if you can see it.

Anyway, these sailboats go by and what they have is, they have this big sail that catches the wind. The wind helps them go, obviously. They need to get that sail just right to catch the wind. It is the same thing with our brain. Our brain is like a sail. In essence what we're doing, our mind is beyond our brain as I see it.

It is beyond us. It is beyond the physical. So the essence of who you are, comes from all those experiences that have come in through your brain. All those you know, all that physical stuff, all those interactions, your memories, the things you've forgotten, all that stuff kind of helps form that but it's a bit beyond.

That's why, for example, I don't know, this is probably going to freak some people out but there's a book written in 2004 and I will put it in the show notes. Her name is Sylvia Browne. I don't know if you've heard of Sylvia Browne. You’ve heard of her?

Hugh:     No.

Walter:    She's a psychic. I always thought she was a total and complete fraud. Maybe she still is but what if I told you that she wrote back in 2004 about this virus that would come in the year 2020 and she basically made all these predictions in this book. She was talking about this virus and she pretty much nailed it.

It's just like people who use things like remote viewing and things like that. Where they pick up on other areas of the planet where they're not physically located. How is that possible, right?

So I believe that our brains can serve as a bit of an antenna. I think of the mind as that aspect or that ability of you as a human to tap into other things. Other than what's in the physical stored in your neurons. So what are your thoughts? I know you probably have some really good ideas along these lines.

Hugh:     I totally agree. I've been researching it quite a bit and I've been looking for this book. The name is escaping me but the guy basically, he's done a lot of studies. He has proven that there is a certain knowledge that sits outside of the body and if you get into this alpha state you can actually access that knowledge. I don't remember what it was but I'll put in the notes when I remember.

Walter:    Is it a new book? Is that a new one or an older one?

Hugh:    No, it's older. I forget the name. Anyway, I’ve read several books like that and then there's that other one, The Secret Life of Plants. It shows that plants actually have a, you know,  they can tell when they're going to be harmed. So when you think about eating plants versus animals, there's kind of no real difference. Once you have that sort of knowledge of what's out there then you can kind of, I think it makes it easier to understand.

There are some other things out there that we don't typically learn about or know about and can be accessed you know from outside of us. It's not just the brain that creates these ideas or these thoughts. If you go through a lot of famous people like composers and artists and all this kind of stuff, a lot of them say that, “I was just the conduit. I did not think of this. Somehow it just came through me and I just moved my hand and you know I wrote this book”. Or, “I painted this painting” or, “I created this opera” or whatever it was.

I believe that there is a certain amount of information out there and like you said I think our brain is just kind of this antenna. It stores a little bit of information about our life right now. It helps us brush our teeth and stuff but other than that, I think there is the potential to get access to this other knowledge.

Walter:    So Carl Young talked about that. I don't know a lot about Carl Young. I wasn't really big into him but some people were. He was a student of Freud; so he talked about collective consciousness. So everyone sort of has this collective you know deep in your unconscious like the shared experience.

Actually, my understanding is that there's data that comes from the mother. Let's say, your mother really loved Doritos or had some trauma at a young age. A really terrible experience when she was five, that actually gets passed on to her children like encoded somehow. All that stuff is really weird, you know, that's the only kind of recent stuff that we found and so there's a lot more to it.

Whenever someone says something like, when you start saying stuff like this and people say like, “Oh well, that's ridiculous” or, that's not real or whatever, I always just come back with, “Well, bloodletting”. We used to think that bloodletting was the thing to do, do you know what I mean?

Hugh:     Like leeches.

Walter:    Yeah, exactly. It's so easy to think that where we are, we're at the tip of the spear. We're at the point of science where we have everything or we're just nearly, we almost have all the knowledge and everything but you always look back in historic time you know.

Look back years and years and go, “Oh, they had bloodletting you know they're a bit off there you know.” I’m sure you know people look back a thousand years from now on us and they'll say, “They didn't have that quite right.”

Hugh:     They were using all these drugs.

Walter:    Exactly. There'll be something. There'll be some clear direction that we sort of went down and it was the wrong path. It was a dead end.

Hugh:    There's a lot of evidence that they're coming up with like in Turkey and stuff. Where they're unearthing these ancient civilizations. They had plumbing and they supposedly had electricity and all this stuff. So that just shows you that we might not be at the top of the mountain or whatever you want to call it; not the highest point of civilization.

Walter:     Exactly. Gobekli Tepe is a great example of that because that shouldn't exist back in the iron age like all that stuff. We weren't supposed to have that in the iron age. Did you hear about that thing they found in Utah? That's just weird.

Hugh:    Which one?

Walter:     Just the other day they found a monolith in Utah. So in the middle of nowhere, these guys were like — I don't know if they were like rangers or foresters. They're geologists or something but they're kind of with the State, you know trooper dudes or whatever some official capacity — on this helicopter and one of the dudes is like, “What's that?” Because they're in this super remote area.

Actually, a friend of mine used to work out with the parks service in Utah and he loved it, out by Moab and stuff. I don't know exactly where it was. You can look it up. I'll put it in the show notes for people. They found this massive metal monolith. A twelve-foot tall monolith stuck into the rock. Just sitting there in the middle of nowhere and they're like, “Dude, what?”

So the only theory right now that they're putting forward is that it is some sort of elaborate art installation. Maybe but who would helicopter that in and there's like no scenes or anything. Where I live, if they put a bike rack into the concrete, into the footpath, or the sidewalk, if they put a bike rack in there, it's always like they had to drill the hole.

They had to kind of spackle the concrete around there and kind of seal it up but this is like, it looks like it just got pushed up out of the ground. It says pristine, metal, shiny. That is I think how the guy saw it. He was up in the helicopter. He's like, “Whoa! What is that down there?”

It's just an example of what you're saying. We don't know everything. I don't know where that came from. Maybe it was some elaborate art installation that they somehow hiked into the middle of nowhere and somehow installed perfectly. Looks like it's cut with lasers or whatever. Maybe it could also be something historical or something. There is no real logical explanation for it. Things like that come up all the time. So I'm totally with you on that one.

Hugh:     They haven't really totally explained the pyramids yet.

Walter:    Exactly.

Hugh:     For like a hundred years, right?

Walter:    Right. No one can do that. No one can do what they did back then. We can't do it today with cranes and all that stuff.

Hugh:     True. Alright, cool. Thanks, Walter.

All the information in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not trading or investment advice.

Enter the Monthly Contest

We give away a trading prize every month, so be sure to enter to win.

You can win by doing one or more of the following:

• Leave a comment on YouTube
• Leave a review on iTunes

Each action counts for one entry in the month that it was posted. We will pick a winner at random from the entries that month.

The giveaways can include books, coaching sessions, trading tools, or surprise gifts.

Click Here to Suggest a Podcast Topic

Listen to the Audio Version

Click the play button below to hear the audio-only version. You can also download the mp3 file below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How to Get New Episodes of The Think Profit Podcast

You can get notified of new episodes of the podcast by subscribing to our email list, or subscribing via any of the major podcast platforms that can be found here.

If you enjoyed this episode, a 5-star review on your favorite podcast platform is always greatly appreciated!

Thanks for listening and we hope that your trading is going well!